Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan criticises the European Union for its handling of the migrant and refugee crisis on Monday. The Turkish head of state said he hoped Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu would return from the meeting in Brussels with three billion euros in aid, promised to Turkey to tackle the refugee emergency

We have been teaching a university short course on “life stories” in the Calais “Jungle”. We have not found the “economic migrants” of whom French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve speaks. Students have had traumatic experiences far exceeding those defining a “refugee”. Fluent and educated in English, they want to use those skills. Many have relatives in the UK; some are minors. A number worked for UK or US forces and were consequently attacked.

A lot was hanging on the Brussels summit, both for the EU and for Turkey. In the end, though, the important judgment will be on how it deals with suffering human beingsThere has been no more important European Union summit for years than the one that took place in Brussels on Monday on the migration crisis. Coping properly with the refugees who streamed into Europe in 2015 remains unfinished business. But preventing 2016 turning into a second, and possibly bigger, version of 2015 is now at least as pressing. By comparison, Britain’s arguments with the EU are second-order problems at best.

The sight of Europe’s leaders kowtowing to the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was sickening

It is waging war on an ethnic minority, its riot police just stormed the offices of a major newspaper, its secret service faces allegations of arming Isis, its military shot down a Russian bomber – and yet Turkey wants to join the European Union. The country’s swift descent into despotism poses yet another existential problem for the west.

European Parliament president Martin Schulz speaks at a news conference in Brussels on Monday following his meeting with Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. Schulz pointed out that the migration and refugee crisis should not be linked to matters related to access negotiations between Turkey and the European Union. Turkey made an application to join the EU in 1987 but its progress has been met with conflict within the body

Freizer from UN, Çorabatır from Asylum and Immigration Research Center, and Ghanem from Syrian Women for Peace Initiative have expressed that UN 1325, CEDAW and İstanbul Convention pave the way for accepting refugee policy sensitive to social gender.